[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 1 finale “9:00 PM.”]
Easily the best show of the year already, The Pitt packs a lot into its Season 1 finale (an hour, perfect for the real-time format, with each episode that length of time of this season-long shift).
The shift ends, and Robby (Noah Wyle) heads home, but not before everything — the anniversary of his mentor’s death, losing his stepson’s girlfriend and him subsequently blaming him and pushing him away, all the losses of the day — drives him up to the roof, where it’s Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) who pulls him back from the edge, in a reversal of the premiere. Langdon (Patrick Ball) refuses to accept the consequences of his addiction, even when Robby details what he needs to do to return to work. We learn Abbot has a prosthetic leg. McKay (Fiona Dourif), thanks to Robby’s intervention and the lives she saved, including a cop’s, avoids being arrested for drilling a hole into her ankle monitor to stop the beeping in the middle of the mass casualty event. Dana (Katherine LaNasa), after being punched by a patient, feels like she’s done. And so much more.
Below, executive producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells, who, respectively, wrote and directed the finale, unpack all its major moments. (Plus, get insight and watch a breakdown of the finale from Wyle, Ball, LaNasa, Hatosy, and Dourif here.)
John, talk about directing Robby’s speech and then the rooftop scene with Robby and Abbot.
John Wells: The rooftop scene with Robby and Abbot and the final scene were shot months before we actually finished the show. Scott’s got a great story about it, which is in the rooftop scene with Abbot, he says, “Great speech,” but there was no speech. How many times did Noah ask you about it?
Max
R. Scott Gemmill: “I can’t wait to see this speech.” And I was like, “You and me both, man. Maybe you should write it. I have no idea what it’s going to be.”
Wells: It was our running joke for months, great speech. And then when we got to it, it was the last thing we shot on the series for this first season, and everybody wanted to get desperately emotional. The set is a bit of a submarine. We’re all there and it’s all day long and it’s for months, and everybody was saying goodbye, and so people were really emotional. The hardest thing about it was everybody kept crying. I was like, “You guys are going home after a long shift, everybody stopped crying.” So if you look around, you’ll still see that people are crying because I couldn’t get them to clean up. They were just crying and crying. We tried not to put everybody on there, but it was kind of a wonderful way to end what he was talking about it.
And this is going to sound strange, but it’s not really a great speech. And that’s sort of what’s great about it, is it’s not polished, it actually feels like somebody who’s had a long day, what they would actually say. And I think that’s part of why it’s so emotional. It’s not fully connected, and Noah played it that way. And so the joke that Noah and I were talking about on the set is it’s the emotion of what he’s saying and what they’ve all been through that comes, not this sort of fantastic oratory. That’s what made it really powerful, and I think it was brilliantly written for that reason because you could have written that as if it was some extraordinarily polished end of a Hollywood film and it’s just a man who’s tired, trying to thank everybody for getting through a tough day
You take Robby so close to the edge, in general and in the finale. How would you say Robby is doing at the end there? Because he seems to be slightly better after that conversation with Abbot, but it’s very much a process and it feels like he can easily end up where he was the next time there’s a shift like this.
Gemmill: Yeah, I think the meltdown for Robby at the end of [Episode] 13 in some ways might’ve been the best thing that’s ever happened to him in a long time because it was basically the pressure valve got released and all that stuff that was building up came out. Now it’s really about, what does Robby do with this? He’s gotten a reset, and does he act upon it the way he should, which is how he would advise others to do so, by seeking help, finding someone to talk to, have conversations? Or does he go back to, well, now that I’m done with that, I can just start pushing stuff back into the dumpster? Hopefully, he will do the former.
Langdon spends the episode fighting for his job, but refuses to do what Robby suggests in order to keep it. What did you want to do with that Robby and Langdon fight, and what was Robby seeing in Langdon in that moment? Because it feels like Langdon went really far with what he said.
Wells: He’s an addict who’s desperately cycling through his anger, his fear, his denial, and he’s trying to not drown. When we were out there, we talked about it as a drowning scene where Langdon is desperate to survive and he is going to try anything and that Robby is hugely disappointed, but more than that, he feels foolish for not seeing it. He feels as if he has missed something. So it’s an attack upon him. Then, of course, when Langdon tries to make the experience of what Robby’s been going through similar somehow to what Langdon’s done, then we get to see Robby blow up, which I’d been waiting for the entire 15 episodes. It showed him to be really human.
Was Langdon high when he returned in 112?
Gemmill: His argument is he’s never high, he’s using it at a maintenance level so he doesn’t get the shakes and stuff like that. I would say he wasn’t high, but he was using, and in the eyes of the law, I’m not sure it makes a difference.
Wells: Yeah, he’s not going to pass a drug test. But is he functioning? Yes. Is he kind of at a level? But you can’t stay at that level for months and months and months or years.
Warrick Page / Max
What does his future look like?
Wells: That’s all up to Langdon. As anyone who’s struggled with any kind of addiction, first, you got to admit that you got a problem. Then you got to start through the process of acknowledging that you need help, acknowledging that this is bigger than you, and then you have to start going through the steps and the process and stick with it. In his case, it’s not just a personal thing that he could do on his own. He has to do it professionally in order to maintain his medical license. So it’s no joke. It’s not like him going through the process on his own. And that’s where Robby leaves it. He says, “This is your second chance, and it’s basically his only chance.” And if he really wants to be a doctor again, he’s going to have to go through this process.
Talk about figuring out how and when you would reveal Abbot’s prosthetic. That was done so well.
Gemmill: That was from the get-go. We knew we were going to do it in the final scene, and we did. Some of the things that you see were planned out well, well in advance. Even some of the more dramatic scenes were actually audition scenes because we knew we had to hire these people so early on, and in some cases, they weren’t having their big moment until 10, 11, 12, 13 episodes down. So some of those scenes were written ahead of time. And the same with the Abbot thing. We wanted him to be a vet. We thought it’d be really interesting if he was an amputee, and it didn’t seem to be any reason to reveal it until he needed to take a little break at the end and give his stump a little bit of a rest. It was important to us.
There’s this question of whether Dana is coming back to work because the way she looks around the ED when she’s leaving, but then there’s a little moment when Robby says, “See you on Monday,” as she’s walking out the door. How does she feel about returning to work? What’s different this time than the other times she’s been in a similar position?
Gemmill: What made it different today is also what she’s said at the one time, that she’s had people spit on her and bite her and kick her and punch her. But most of the time they were someone who was having a mental health episode or they were on drugs or they were drunk or altered in some other way, shape or fashion. But this case was just a guy who was angry. For her, it’s just the civility is gone. People just don’t have the respect for each other, let alone people in the medical field. It’s a federal offense to, I think, assault a bus driver in New York, but it’s not a federal offense to attack a nurse or a doctor or someone in the medical field. So there’s a disconnect there. She’s kind of reached the end of her rope.
Wells: We’re living in an angry time, and it’s connected, too, to what happened in Covid. The show is about, we can’t forget. We can’t forget what people did for us through Covid. We all want to forget Covid because it was a very complicated and difficult time and many of us lost people, but that’s a permanent thing for everybody who lived through it and worked through it and saved lives and lost friends in the hospitals. But what’s happened is just everybody is at a stress level now in the country where we’re seeing more — just driving around town, you see an extraordinary amount of aggression. There’s just more aggression, there’s more just lack of respect. That’s what we’re really trying to get at.
But she’s going to be back, right?
Gemmill: Let’s put it this way: I guarantee you that Dana didn’t show up on Monday like she was supposed to, but I think she takes a great pride in her ER family and will always be a den mother to that flock and will eventually return at some point.
Would Robby have brought Flynn’s father into the makeshift morgue like he did if not for everything else about that day for him personally?
Gemmill: No. I think that was served two purposes. One is to show Robby’s frustration, but also to show that he’s no longer in control of his full capacity because he never would’ve done that on a regular day.
Did you ever consider actually showing the conversation that Robby had with Leah’s parents versus just seeing him go in the room and then leave?
Gemmill: No. To me, it was more powerful. We know what that’s going to be like. What we don’t know is — we know how it’s going to affect him. Alan Parker did a scene like that, a shot like that, in Mississippi Burning [with] Gene Hackman, and he shot it from outside and you never got to hear what they’re talking about. And when I saw that, I was like, f**k, that’s so smart. So I just ripped it off. I thought we didn’t need to hear anymore sadness. It was more about seeing Robby, knowing he has to go in that room, knowing he’s going to have to deliver this bad news. And then just hearing the grief that comes out of it. There was no reason. I couldn’t have done it as much justice as the way John shot it, which was as simple and painful as it was.
John: And we’d seen already during the course of this day Robby have to do versions of that before. So we already knew exactly what was going to get said, as Scott is saying. So I think filling it in, allowing the audience, the respect of the audience, to fill it in, their intelligence, their visual literacy [worked].
Also, the way that Noah plays the weight on Robby the entire time, you don’t need to see it, you know all of it.
Gemmill: I don’t have to write it. I just tell him, go act it. And he does. It makes me look way better than I could ever be.
Of course, the season ends like it began with Robby walking. How early on in the planning of the season did you know you’d be doing that?
Gemmill: Day one. Yeah, we knew we were going to end with — hopefully it was going to be end with him walking away, putting his headphones on, going right back to the same song [“Baby” by Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise] at the same place, and just seeing him walk off into the night and ostensibly get ready for another day.
Wells: We knew it so early that we actually negotiated two uses over two episodes of the song.
Doug (Drew Powell) was arrested. Did you ever consider leaving that up in the air?
Gemmill: We probably did think about not even addressing it. I’m not sure why we chose to, I don’t remember. It might’ve been just to try and wrap a few things up so we didn’t go out with a whole bunch of loose ends, but it just seemed like if the police were doing their job, they should have [found him] because we knew who he was, we had all his information. It just added a little bit of closure, and then it was about, is Dana going to press charges? And she just wants it all to go away, whereas Robby’s pushing her to do the right thing just, if nothing else, so he doesn’t do it again to somewhere else.
Something that has stood out is that there’s no romance and this show doesn’t need it either because we hear about some relationships, but it’s all offscreen and that’s really it. Did you set out to do that? Was that just what happened and is that the plan to continue that?
Gemmill: Well, if you’ve ever been in an ER, it’s not maybe the most romantic place you’d go for a hookup. You’d have to be in a real certain state, I think. No, it was a byproduct of what the show is, essentially. It’s all set in the ER and it takes place over 15 hours. So how much can you do within that 15 hours in terms of say, Javadi meeting somebody or somebody new? It takes usually more than a 15-hour workday to create a relationship. So we may hint at things moving forward, but we’re not going to find anyone having sex in a broom closet any time soon.
We’ve seen that Robby is terrible at keeping a relationship. Is there anything that you’re thinking about exploring when it comes to that with him going forward?
Gemmill: That’s exactly what we talked about today. We are talking about Robby and his past relationships and what that means moving forward and where he is in his life. And that’s an ongoing discussion, and it’s an interesting one because we do want to explore that more and take him to a place and find out what he wants. What does Robby want? Where does he want to be at the end of this year in his life? When is he going to settle down or what is he looking for? So that’s all the questions that we’re asking ourselves right now.
Yeah, because there’s the Robby and Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) of it. Yes, they had a past, but what could the future possibly be?
Gemmill: Yep, yep. All of that. That’s the great thing about having a show like this. You create these characters and then you just wind ’em up and let ’em go and try and keep up with them.
So that is a possibility?
Gemmill: Anything’s possible. I mean, especially at the beginning of the year. As we get along, move along, certain things fall into place. But right now we are just the fun exploratory phase.
The Pitt, Season 1, Streaming Now, Max
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
